At the shivah house, a friend whose son is a classmate of Avigail’s son Meir recounted, “We all knew Avigail was  operating on a different level. My Purim was about my mishloach manos, my friends and family. Avigail, on the other hand, would gather a group of Meir’s friends together on Purim to deliver mishloach manos to people unlikely to get any. She wanted to reach those people who get forgotten — and to teach these boys what a Yom Tov should really be about. We all marveled at how she managed to be so normal, and yet so much more.”

Avigail’s thoughtfulness wasn’t limited to Purim. “She always remembered that there were people who had no one to share Yom Tov with,” her sister Yali notes, “and she’d make extra efforts to reach out to them, to let them know they were not forgotten; she’d bring them latkes for Chanukah and honey cake for Rosh Hashanah.”

Tzniyus Beyond the Hemline

While the Rechnitzes are renowned for business success and munificent philanthropy, Avigail and Yisroel Zev chose to set an example of living simply: their home, while tastefully decorated, is modestly sized. “She didn’t want to have an intimidating home,” says Chavie. “She’d say, ‘I want everyone who walks into my house to feel this is a house they could live in.’$$$seperatequote$$$”

Until recently, the family dined on a conference table from Staples; beautifully set, it didn’t matter what it looked like underneath the Shabbos tablecloth. “We only bought a dining room set after she got sick. Fancy furniture meant nothing to her,” her husband says. “We both grew up in homes that were comfortable but not fussy. If I bought jewelry or flowers for her, she’d say she liked it. But for her, the card was always most important.”

Avigail cultivated a sense of limits in her children; her daughter had three or four Shabbos dresses, not a wardrobe-full. When her oldest son’s bike was stolen, she didn’t replace it right away, but let him walk to school awhile, “to teach him to be careful with his possessions.”

Deliberately unostentatious, Avigail was nevertheless very organized and neat. Her husband grins, “She used to keep all my ties and shirts sorted by color.”

“Avigail could have a whole crowd for Shabbos, and Friday afternoon her counters would be clean!” marvels her mother-in-law Debbie Rechnitz. But she never held others to such high standards.

The Rechnitz home included a guesthouse for visitors, a testimony to Avigail’s meticulous attention to detail. “It was always booked, often months in advance,” Yisroel Zev says, showing off the large room with twin beds and a fully-equipped kitchenette, down to the espresso machine. Eleven years old, it looks spanking new.

“The basket in the bathroom would be overflowing with every imaginable kind of toiletry, disposable cameras for the tourists. The table would have fresh flowers and the small kitchen would be stocked with juices, food, freshly baked cookies.” Originally designed with Avigail’s grandmother in mind, it went on to host many important guests. Yisroel Zev’s rosh yeshivah from Telshe Yeshivah Chicago, Rav Avraham Chaim Levin, used to come from time to time with his wife when he needed repose. “Avigail would receive them like royalty, anticipating their every need,” Tamar remembers.

At Avigail’s funeral, Rav Levin spoke poignantly, “I am a rosh yeshivah. I don’t mention women’s first names. But Avigail, to me, was like a daughter.”

Building a Dream

Eight years ago, Avigail’s friend Eynat Blonder received a call from her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who’d started the original Ladies Bikur Cholim in Los Angeles with some friends. “They were organizing their annual luncheon, but it just wasn’t getting off the ground,” Eynat says. “She asked if some of my friends could lend a hand.”

Bikur Cholim was not new for Avigail, as she had been an active participant of the local Bikur Cholim while growing up. Then she had been part of a cadre of teens who visited nearby adult homes and would happily join the groups who delivered mishloach manos to patients at the local hospital on Purim.

Soon, Avigail and Eynat became the new blood that revitalized Bikur Cholim. The challenge fully engaged Avigail’s sharp mind and efficiency, and she became energized with helping the needy of her community. Always present at meetings with her trademark legal pad, Avigail’s professional training found new applications.

Minna Majer, a member of the Bikur Cholim, notes that, “She would interview every client to learn exactly what was needed — be it a meal, a hospital bed, a heater, a ride, or an advocate. And she cared enough to follow up, find out if our efforts had been effective, and modify the help as necessary.

Avigail networked with other community leaders to locate medical professionals willing to provide needed services at greatly reduced rates. She was also very effective at using her legal writing skills to advocate for clients with government and other agencies. It gave her tremendous satisfaction when she was able to get insurance coverage for a sick person who had none.

“She had this very upper-class way of expressing herself, and she knew how to deal with hospitals or agencies like Medicaid or Medicare,” Tamar recounts. “Sometimes she’d send Bikur Cholim letters on her legal stationery, signed ‘Avigail Rechnitz, Esq.,’ just to give more clout.”

Avigail could never do things halfway; every job had to be well done. She brought flair and meticulous planning to the annual fundraising luncheon. One year showcased a cupcake baking contest, judged by professional bakers, another featured a health fair. Avigail would think of everything, including decorated wheelchairs and water bottles for attendees unable to walk down a long entry. If she volunteered to send food, it was always abundant and beautifully executed. Her sister-in-law Chavie remembers, “If she sent fruit, it would be like a fruit platter for a simchah. This may sound over-the-top and unnecessary, but Avigail understood that you needed to make people feel valued and chashuv, not just to take care of their physical needs.”

Once, Avigail and her friend Adina each sent two containers of chicken soup to an elderly man. After Shabbos, the man’s daughter reported to Avigail with amazement: “He will barely eat anything! But, wow, he really enjoyed that soup you sent.” In effort to send the same soup in the future, Avigail probed a bit – “Um, we sent four containers of soup, do you know which ones he liked?” The woman responded that they’d opened all the containers and mixed them together in one pot. Avigail’s next call was to Adina: “We may need to be partners in something.” From that point until it was no longer necessary, Adina would send two containers of soup, which Avigail mixed with two containers of her own — if this miracle soup would get the man to enjoy a little of Shabbos, that was the exact soup he would get.

Before long Avigail marshaled 200 volunteers for Bikur Cholim, coordinating them with a texting system that alerted volunteers when services like meals or rides were needed. “Avigail originally did all the dispatching, but later the text phone would rotate between four people,” Tamar explains. “She would hand pick people — she had a reason to assign each person to each job, and she’d keep track of every volunteer’s contributions to avoid overburdening and to be able to show hakaras hatov.” Every week volunteers would cook and deliver meals, accompany the elderly to appointments and visit the homebound. Bikur Cholim also distributed medical supplies, paid doctor bills, organized housekeeping services, and delivered groceries.

It was extremely important to Avigail that the developing organization be a true community organization; she wanted to provide a framework for people to help fellow Jews when they might otherwise have been too reticent to take action. She didn’t want Bikur Cholim to be known as “her” organization, rather a community of women nurturing and mothering their community. (To that end, her name was one of many listed on the organization’s letterhead.) She aspired to shape how the ladies of the community see themselves — not as isolated people living their own lives, but as a true community who were all called upon to ensure no one fell through the cracks.

Often the organization’s expenses outstripped their funding, but financial hiccups mysteriously resolved themselves — thanks to Avigail. For example, Eynat would cash checks to pay home attendants, then discover that even though the account balance was zero, the attendants were paid anyway. “I realized Avigail had been quietly paying out of her own pocket,” she reports.

Avigail felt convinced Hashem wanted her to do this work. She understood that the gifts He gave her were for her to share. One particular experience, which she often retold, brought home that message to her. While shopping in a local grocery store, a woman caught her eye and asked Avigail to pay for her purchases. Avigail agreed, but watched with amazement as the woman piled on all sorts of “luxurious” expenses — specialty items, not the staples she had expected. Avigail described herself beginning to feel resentment building: It’s one thing to buy someone groceries, but exotic cheeses and expensive frozen food items?

When the items were rung up, though, she was flabbergasted: the total cost of the woman’s purchases was exactly the same — down to the last cent — as the cost of the purchases Avigail had just moments before made for her own family. She took this as a reminder that she was the fortunate one to be paying not only her own family’s needs, but someone else’s as well; whatever she had was only hers in name, but truly belonged to the community.

“I knew of her activities,” Yisroel Zev laments, ”she had this phone stuck to her all the time, and there were all these nights she had a stack of ‘just one more things’ to take care of that together almost never got her in bed before two or three in the morning. But I didn’t fully appreciate the extent of what she was accomplishing.”

As time progressed and the organization grew, so did Avigail’s aspirations. She envisioned a Bikur Cholim of extraordinary proportions, eventually including centers for women’s health, learning, and childcare. “She believed in the competence and royalty of Jewish women,” says sister-in- law Chavie. “She wanted to help every woman reach her potential.”

Malkie Halberstam, a volunteer with the ladies’ Bikur Cholim, adds, “She made every volunteer feel privileged to participate and that they were doing her a personal favor when they accepted an assignment. She gave us opportunities to do good, to be good, and we felt ennobled to be a part of the work.”

To start the process of expanding Bikur Cholim, Avigail organized a conference, inviting doctors, the Jewish Federation, specialists in Medicaid, Medicare, and health insurance. The Jewish Federation offered to assist with psychological help and background checks; doctors volunteered to do free consults, and vendors offered medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. Government specialists were prepared to offer assistance in obtaining aid whenever or wherever possible.

The day after this promising meeting, the phone rang in the Rechnitz home. Avigail picked up, listened, and froze. “It was the doctor’s office. They were telling her she had cancer,” Yisroel Zev recalls. “I took the phone from her and started speaking to the doctor. And thus began our hellish journey.”

Valley of Shadows

At first, Avigail shared her diagnosis with very few people. “She was afraid people would stop asking her for help,” Yisroel Zev says.

Avigail dreaded that first day of chemotherapy, and Yisroel Zev promised to orchestrate an hour-long phone call with Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller, whom Avigail found deeply inspiring, while the drugs were administered. Secretly, he arranged to fly Rebbetzin Heller to Los Angeles. As the chemo began, he told Avigail, “Okay, I think I have her on the phone.” Then he opened the curtain to reveal Rebbetzin Heller. “She was overwhelmed with emotion,” Yisroel Zev says.

“This was the biggest gift Yisroel Zev could have given her at that time. Her strongest desire in this moment of darkness was to understand the spiritual meaning and implication of what was happening to her,” explains a good friend.

Always growth-oriented and spiritual, Avigail regularly listened to shiurim and sought out Torah ideas. But when she got sick, she could not help asking “Why?” “She was very upset to be sick, frustrated that Hashem had given her these children but wasn’t letting her raise them,” Yisroel Zev says. Ultimately, she came to feel Hashem was telling her she couldn’t always be in control, and she worked on herself to let go of things that weren’t important.

After a year, scans showed no evidence of cancer, although chances of a recurrence were high. But if Avigail knew this, she didn’t let on. “She could search the internet as well as anyone else; she must have known,” Yisroel Zev says. “But I think she didn’t want to believe it would come back.”

Nevertheless, when the couple began shopping for a somewhat larger home, she chose the house right next door to her in-laws. “What daughter-in-law picks the house next door to her mother-in-law?” Yisroel Zev says. “She must have had a premonition.”

Though the family looked forward with optimism, Avigail sensed something was not quite right. Only a few short months later, the day before they were supposed to go to a Telshe Yeshiva dinner honoring Yisrael Zev, doctors informed them the cancer had returned. But Avigail, wanting the dinner to be as successful as possible, would not consider missing the dinner. “She was the perfect hostess, smiling and chatting with dinner guests and looking as elegant as ever,” said a dinner participant.

Always intensely private — Avigail never liked having her name or her husband’s on any sort of honor — she did her best to hide her condition, both to give her children a normal life as long as possible and to continue her work of helping others. Even as she went through tremendous physical suffering, she was helping others. The last few months of her life she could barely eat, yet she cooked regularly for others in the community.

Once, during a chemo session at the hospital, her cell phone rang — a choleh in the hospital needed a listening ear. As they spoke, a “code blue” rang out, and the woman realized Avigail was in the hospital too. Avigail told her she was visiting someone else, which prompted the woman to request a visit as well. When the chemo finished four hours later, Avigail went to visit the lady despite her severe nausea and fatigue. “I was always taken by the irony that even during her treatments she was fielding calls from people who were in much better shape than her,” recalls her husband.

Her illness progressed until the final, awful day when her soul departed.

Avigail’s levayahs in Los Angeles and Eretz Yisrael drew thousands; she had touched so many lives.  “Somebody said to me, ‘She sounds like Rebbetzin Kanievsky,’$$$seperatequote$$$” says Eynat.  “But she didn’t fit the saintly rebbetzin image; she was very normal, down to earth.”

The sheer number and wide range of people who Avigail had touched only became apparent during shivah. A non-Jewish neighborhood handyman broke down in tears —Avigail used to send him on fix-it jobs for those in need, and he couldn’t believe that she was gone. A woman who regularly came, completely broken, to the Rechnitz home to collect money shared, “I once told Avigail I had no friends in this world, and she told me she was my friend. She was the only friend I had.” Then there was the recently orphaned teenager, whose living expenses and tuition Avigail had taken on; he turned out to be a distant cousin.

A few weeks after shivah, Avigail’s brother Menachem was seeing a patient for a routine office visit. The patient had heard the doctor had just lost a close family member and revealed to him, “I also just lost someone very close to me,” referring to Avigail but not realizing this was her doctor’s late sister.

“She was someone a regular person could strive to emulate,” says Tamar. “Now, at Bikur Cholim meetings, we ask ourselves, ‘What would Avigail have said?’$$$$seperatequote$$$”

“In many ways, she’s still running it,” agrees Eynat.

Avigail’s husband concludes, “With her upbringing and resources, she could have been or done anything. She choose to use her short time on this earth to leave the world a better place than she found it.”

The Fruits of Her Pain

After her diagnosis, Avigail threw herself into learning all she could about her illness. When she discovered the role diet plays in protecting the body from the development of cancer, she had to share this with others, in hope that such knowledge might help others to stay well.

Avigail developed “Aseed” or “Atid (the future)” in Hebrew, a program to teach nutritional concepts in school. She organized a group of women to prepare lessons on healthy eating. “She wanted to teach it in a fun way, to make it cool to eat healthy snacks,” remembers Shuly Berkowitz, a close friend who now heads the program. “Each month we presented a new lesson for the different age groups in the school. Avigail prepared this amazing lesson, called ‘Eating the Rainbow’ to teach children about the health benefits of different colored fruits and vegetables.

“Avigail also devised an incentive program, in which a class would get a token for every day each student brought a fruit or vegetable as a snack,” Shuly explains. “The tokens could be traded in for prizes. If a child did not have a fruit one day, she could get one from the big basket of fruit that was going to be available outside the office — stocked with the ‘fruit of the month’.”

Avigail had hoped to start the program on Tu B’Shevat of last year, but her illness had returned, and she was not able to realize her vision.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 396)